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Judge Rejects Approval of Engineered Sugar Beets
countertrolling writes "A federal judge has ruled that the government failed to adequately assess the environmental impacts of genetically engineered sugar beets before approving the crop for cultivation in the United States. The decision could lead to a ban on the planting of the beets, which have been widely adopted by farmers. Beets supply about half the nation's sugar, with the rest coming from sugar cane. The Agriculture Department did conduct an environmental assessment before approving the genetically engineered beets in 2005 for widespread planting. But the department concluded there would be no significant impact, so a fuller environmental impact statement was not needed. But Judge White said that the pollen from the genetically engineered crops might spread to non-engineered beets. He said that the 'potential elimination of farmer's choice to grow non-genetically engineered crops, or a consumer's choice to eat non-genetically engineered food' constituted a significant effect on the environment that necessitated an environmental impact statement. There's still hope, isn't there? That we can at least get this stuff labeled properly?"
Now I'm not all that fussy about not eating bio-engineered food. But I think that biodiversity is a Good Thing, and that it's probably a good idea to preserve some uncontaminated stock (the old adage of "work on a backup" applies doubly when you're dealing with your food supply).
Add to that the way a lot of the bioengineering agritech firms love to assert copyright over their "intellectual property" (plant genetic material), whether or not the farmer actually wanted it or if it was undesirable cross-pollination, and I say good for Judge White.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
Definition of evolution: change in the gene pool of a population from generation to generation by such processes as mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift.
Eg Delta, change, any change good or bad. You people need to get off of the soundbite train and get a grasp on what evolution is.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
I think companies like Monsanto should not be allowed to sue farmers just because the pollen from their genetically modified food crops spread to other fields, Monsanto released the product in to the open air world so it is only natural that the pollen from their products are going to spread to other plants, proving the farmer not at fault...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Direct insertion of DNA sequences from other species is different to breeding and selection.
End of story.
By all means get pissy about the definition of evolution, you're just trying to play semantics that have nothing at all to do with the argument at hand.
And I wish you people would stop "you people"'ing me. For god's sake, it's as if you people are incapable of addressing individuals.
This is getting to be less and less true, regardless of how "cheap" you are, and that's the point.
There was an article in Wired a while back that dealt with genetically engineered beef, going in depth into the whole process by which it's created, interviewing the farmers and other people along every step of the chain. The upshot was that it's basically impossible *not* to buy genetically engineered beef these days, because there are so many people out there who don't follow what few rules there are, there's so little enforcement and such big financial incentives for breaking the rules. (Nobody wants to buy cattle with stringy beef when it's next to a bunch of other cattle that are plumped up artificially.)
And the thing you have to remember is that once you've contaminated the chain, it's impossible to uncontaminate it. It's like trying to remove paint thinner from a pitcher full of drinking water. Once it's in there, it's almost impossible to separate it again. If you have one genetically modified bull producing offspring with non-modified cattle, all of those offspring will then be genetically modified, and nobody knows about it. They will then have their own offspring, and REALLY quickly you will have an entire system full of contaminated beef.
All anybody wants is the choice to eat this stuff or not. And that's being taken away with the lack of rules, the lack of oversight and the lack of labeling. Nobody is saying this stuff shouldn't even be on the market, we're just saying it needs to be labeled, and separated from the natural stuff.
That's fine, the problem which the judge is rightly pointing out is when pollen from GE self terminating sugarbeet plants pollinates a "warty disease filled" heirloom crop of sugar beets, thereby destroying that farmers heirloom strain while he's getting sued by Monsanto for having a 95% match rate in his crops DNA with the patented GE crop.
It's still not that unusual. Viruses do that very thing all the time. It'd take a really long time to do it the sexual way, but it's nothing that can't be done with enough patience. GM is just really really fast breeding. Get over it.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
I see a lot of "it's just sugar" or "everything's genetically modified" arguments cropping up here; it's really not that simple. Plants are surprisingly "promiscuous" (follow this thread for a number of, no doubt, terribly ribald comments on *that* one). Traits adopted by one set of plants can make their way over to others of the same or different species. Depending on what traits are being modified, this can be a bad thing; consider that Roundup resistance in weeds is not just a result of selective pressure, but of the movement of genes from Monsanto's Roundup resistant seed stocks to neighboring plants.
Yes, this sort of "gene flow" happens in the soi disant natural world as well, but, like CO2 production, modern technology allows us to make bigger, more significant differences over a much shorter period of time. Caution is appropriate here.
Do we really have the confidence in our understanding of genetic mechanisms to rule out harmful side-effects?
Turn that question around: What are the side effects of non-GMO crops?
Almost all of this debate misses the fundamental point of introducing alien species (and that's what GMO crops are... we've just refined the granularity of introduction to genetic fragments rather than a whole creature). Toads would not have been a problem in Australia or pigs in Hawaii, had they evolved there, naturally. They problem is that it takes centuries for an ecosystem to adapt to even the smallest change in an existing species and millennia or much longer to adapt to major changes.
In short, it's not the evolution of the crops that's in question, but of the environment around them and how it will respond.
We're currently at the "what could possibly go wrong" stage, and companies like Mosanto correctly point out that they'll go out of business if they need to wait for 100 years to see what the results of their tinkering might be, but are we protecting a company at the cost of our future health and well being? We literally have no idea.
OMG, some company wants to make money by making farming more efficient , eco friendly, and create safer foods.
Run for the hills.
You do knwo that is the only complaint against them, right. "They make money, therefore there bad" is a weak ass argument.
More like "they would like to control the food supply, in much the same way that Microsoft now controls the desktop operating system industry". Some of us find that prospect a disturbing one, and a hard look at Monsanto's business tactics and their allergy to full disclosure does not comfort us one bit. Honestly, I don't know where you get this idea from that the only reason why someone would dislike a company is that they are successful at making money. I am sorry but it sounds like a sound bite from a talk radio show host, not a serious attempt at reasoning. How they go about making that money and how their methods might negatively affect others, either directly or by setting undesirable precedents, is the issue here.
... safer foods" would not be eager to label them as such and in fact has fought tooth and nail to prevent any sort of product labels that would identify the fruits of their labors. The only conclusion that makes sense is that they know some people don't want GMO foods and the like and believe that their desire for additional sales volume overrides the average person's right to know what they are buying (or to not purchase something they don't want). The problem with that is that once people no longer know what they are buying, all free-market concepts of "what the market wants" go out the window and you can accurately say that at least some of their business is built on deception.If anyone stands up and suggests that maybe this isn't the best way to do things and that maybe we should question the motives of people who do things this way, would you really suggest that the company's profitability is the only possible reason for doing so? Could you do that with a straight face?
If you want a starting point that you can plug into Google while you disabuse yourself of any concept of this company's benevolence, I have three words for you: bovine growth hormone. This would be very much like telling someone to learn about Microsoft and how they do business by studying their interactions with the ISO concerning OOXML, except in Monsanto's case the controversy was not about a standards body but instead, the major media.
If you're more subtle you could also ask yourself why a company with "more efficient, eco friendly, and
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
It's pretty unfair to criticize something that started out a safety feature and morphed into something that turned into a way of enforcing a license agreement.
And then turned into a way of sueing other farmers because their fields where next to someone who had the terminator corn - also causing that person to not have enough for the next year.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
--In short, they're patent-wielding litigious bastards.--
I can't mod you any higher or I would, but this is true.
--If their position wasn't opposite that of environmentalist, Slashdot readers would be on the anti-Monsanto bandwagon like white on rice.--
I could have said that better but would have had to curse to do it.
I'm not really against GM stuff as such. I don't see the big deal except with what you have already stated.
Indeed. I'd rather see a hundred major corporations go bankrupt than see one of them control the food supply and there's nothing "anti-capitalist" about saying so.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
To explain this in simple terms:
- Today's genetically modified insect repellent high yield crop might be tomorrow's "mana from the gods" for some crop pest or other.
If one plant in a crop which is composed of plants all sharing the exact same DNA is/becomes susceptible to one kind of crop pest/disease (which is bound to happen sooner or later since said pests/diseases are also exposed to evolutionary pressures), then the whole crop will be susceptible.
Biodiversity (even amongst the same species of family of plants and animals) makes our crops more resistant to this kind of scenarios.
Due to the way GM plants are created and the fact that things like terminator genes mean that for many GM plants natural reproduction is not viable, the number of DNA variants for any given GM species is limited and no natural evolution can take place. The result is whole fields covered in what essentially are clones (or a small number of variants) year-in-year-out, while the local pests/viruses/bacterias are evolving/adapting to be able to eat/infect that very small genetic pool of plants.
If on a wider scale a specific strain of a GM plant (say wheat) becomes a large percentage of the total crop of that kind of plant, then the conditions are set for a full-blown collapse of most of a year's crop of that plant at a global (or at least continental) level - for example having 90% of the wheat crop in both South-America and North-America die because those 90% are all a single kind of GM-wheat for which a highly deadly disease has just evolved.
For a long time I felt that there was nothing -wrong- with GMOs, only that Monsanto is a corporate bully whose monopoly negatively impacts our system. Then I did more research.
Rewind back in time: Not too long ago the world was certain that food contained just a couple of nutrients (now thought of as being 'macro'nutrients). Protein, Fat and Carbohydrates. Food scientists believed that as long as you got enough of the proper balance of those 3 nutrients then you'd be a healthy, happy person. People still got sick. In fact, those who followed this diet religiously got sicker. Fast forward a few years. Food scientists now know that in addition to these macronutrients there were also micronutrients that were essential to human health (vitamins). Fast forward again to the current day. Food scientists now know that there are other things in play. Such as omega fatty acids (which we are only now finding out that its not really the amount of fatty acids that is important, but the ratio of one kind to the other), certain 'helpful' bacteria, etc.
My point is, we are always absolutely convinced we understand nutrition, but it always turns out that we are missing countless valuable information. White bread exists because we discovered long ago that if you remove those worthless vitamins and minerals then you could improve the shelf life*. Margarine replaced butter in many households because at one point we decided that trans fats were bad for you and trans fats were perfectly fine. Babies that are given infant formula (one of the most complex and ever changing food products that exists) still don't thrive as well as babies that are breast-fed.
GMOs are a bad idea because we're assuming we know whats good for us (and we've proven time and time again that we know shit all). We're constantly breeding out traits that we view as insignificant in favour of yield and pest resistance and studies have shown that crops grown in 2009 contain significantly fewer nutrients than they did even just 20 years ago. America, relative to the abundance of food that is grown there is one of the most undernourished countries in the world. Genetically modifying food just makes it that much easier to fuck around with things that we don't fully understand.
*one of the way shelf life is improved is because the little creatures that feed off if it fail to thrive because the nutrients are just not there. If fungal spores refuse to consume it then what the fuck are we doing choosing it as our preferred type of bread? Shouldn't this be a hint?
Direct insertion of DNA sequences from other species is different to breeding and selection.
Of course it's DIFFERENT, duh.
Your burden of proof is to show us it's WORSE. So far you haven't done that. You've just laid out a lot of scary language designed by Greenpeace to frighten people who don't know jack about genetics or science-in-general. You'll find the audience here is not the man-on-the-street.
So, go ahead, prove that using GM to obtain specific traits is worse than breeding for specific traits. Prove it.
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Have you eaten wheat? Corn? Beef? Chicken?
All of these products were genetically modified by people long before we knew what genes were. In its natural state, wheat blows away in the wind, leaving no food to eat. Mutant strains kept the seeds, and we cultivated those. Mutant strains developed by Borlaug in the 1950s saved millions from death and billions from starving.
Cows are domesticated from aurochs, now extinct. Wild corn is an inch long and hard as a rock.
Everything we've eaten for millenia has been genetically modified for maximum yield and higher efficiency.
We just have different tools now. What if they'd used phenotype selection to create a super-sweet beet instead? Would that be a problem? Eventually Mostanto could create a roundup-ready corn using artificial selection, the same way we've been doing it since we dug furrows in Mesopotamia.
Would that be fine? Is it just the tool that's the problem or is it hysteria at anything that's genetically modified and labelled as a Frankenfood by enivronmentalists?
For the record, I am a vegetarian.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I guess that the worst problem with these technologies is monoculture.
But monoculture has nothing to do with genetics. Nothing at all. For example, most plantations growing bananas are a monoculture, but they aren't genetically modified at all.
So you're basically saying, "I have absolutely no evidence that GM is worse, but here's a completely unrelated example that has nothing to do with GM." We're not that stupid, buddy, bring facts or go home.
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